Mathew Horne, best known as the front
half of television sitcom couple Gavin
and Stacey, isn’t the most vocally nuanced of actors onstage.
Most of the lines he utters sound quite as deliberate as Joe Orton’s
writing of them. But his face is another matter. He has an extensive
arsenal of reaction expressions, sometimes simply clocking a double entendre (of which, this
being early Orton, there are many), sometimes also noting the ulterior
motive behind a proposition. And he does it all without seeming to move
a muscle. The face is dominated by those eyes of his: at once wide,
piercing and jaded, they give him the look of an owl that has seen too
much.

The natural prey of such an owl would be the small field creature that
is Imelda Staunton. As Kath, she ushers Horne’s bisexually predatory
Sloane in with the play’s opening line, “This is my lounge!”, investing
it with altogether too much banal pride and, somehow, a heavy undertow
of sexual enticement. “I’ve got long legs,” coos the five-foot-nothing
actress and (having already vouchsafed to Sloane that she has no
underwear on) essays a brief high kick with a delicious expression,
simultaneously full of liberated excitement and shocked censoriousness.

The third wheel of this peculiar carriage is Kath’s brother Ed, a
repressed pseudo-military type with a poker up his backside in every
sense. Simon Paisley Day offers Sloane encouragement “with me behind
you”, and when making an agreement desires, “Your hand on it.” Richard
Bremmer as Ed and Kath’s father looks three parts elderly Eamon de
Valera to one of Albert Steptoe.

Although his first staged play (in 1964), Entertaining Mr Sloane feels in
many ways to be the most comprehensive indicator of what Orton could
have achieved had he lived. Its attack on sexual hypocrisy has real
teeth as well as black humour, there is nevertheless a poignancy to
Kath’s ill-articulated desires, and even a 21st-century press night
audience audibly gasped at the sudden violence in the second half.
There is also something chilling about Ed’s casual remark when he and
Kath turn the tables on Sloane and force him into a domestic and sexual
servitude that will last “Not eternally, boy, just a few years.” Nick
Bagnall’s production gives the play a full personal service, nudge
nudge.